


Inherited Characteristics

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Awesome Peggy Carter, Daddy Issues, Gen, Peggy fixes things, Teenage Rebellion, Tony Being Tony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-03-08 10:21:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3205730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 1986, the Sox are going to the World Series, and sixteen-year-old Tony Stark has just gotten himself arrested for trying to sell nukes to the bad guys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inherited Characteristics

In hindsight, Tony was not surprised when the FBI swooped in en masse. That had been, in fact, an option he'd considered when he'd set the meeting at the vacant storefront off Magoun Square: that this would all be a sting. Other options had included getting shot and nobody coming at all, so a dozen guys in suits and FBI windbreakers probably split the difference. Either way, mission accomplished and he was maybe a little too upbeat for the Feebs' liking as they hauled him back across the Charles in the back of an unmarked car.

He was well under eighteen, so they couldn't officially do much of anything without an adult guardian present, something he was cheerful to point out. Unofficially, however, they had lots of questions and no real shyness about asking them in ways that were unpleasant and flaunted the border between meaningful threats and 'hey, just tryin' to scare the kid straight, ya know?'

Tony gave them points for style -- there were a couple of moments when he was sure, were he anyone else, he'd have been down right terrified -- but only points. The only words out of his mouth were "unaccompanied minor" and "lawyer."

His parents were fuck knew where, Obie was probably at the annual SEA arms conference in Singapore, and Jarvis was setting up the chalet in St. Moritz for the season, so getting someone with any putative claim on him was impossible and, at this hour of the night, finding someone from Child Protective Services or whatever agency covered situations like this was going to take a while. The FBI wouldn't give him coffee -- "you wanna be a kid, kids don't drink joe" -- and so he put his head down on his folded arms and slept at the table in the interrogation room.

He was woken up an indeterminate time later -- the clock on the wall still said half-past one -- by the door opening and a well-dressed woman coming into the room.

"Are you my court-appointed nanny here to encourage me to tell the nice FBI men everything I know?" Tony asked brightly.

The woman -- older lady, closer to Dad's age than to Mom's, not super-rich but definitely not a civil servant -- arched an eyebrow. "Don't you watch too much television," she said in an English accent as she closed the door behind her and crossed the room, taking the seat on the other side of the table.

"My name is Peggy Carter," she said as she sat down, leaving her fancy hat on but taking off her gloves. "I'm a friend of your father's."

It was Tony's turn to cock an eyebrow. "You're a little old for one of Dad's _friends_."

Dad's friends came in two varieties, the men he did business with and the women he slept with and the only overlap was that sometimes the women were married to the men, a fact that never seemed to bother Dad. Stark men took what they wanted, after all.

"I'm a lot old for one of Howard's friends," she agreed dryly. "But that's because I haven't blown myself up or drank myself to death or gotten myself cut up by cannibals in deepest Africa, or whatever the story about Rathermane was."

It was cannibals in Africa, but that was just one version. Another had George Rathermane dying of a heart attack in a whorehouse in Casablanca.

"Who are you really and why are you here?" Tony asked, since he didn't like people who didn't rise to his bait. Also, he was tired and hungry and uncomfortable and getting a headache from caffeine withdrawal.

"I've already answered the who," Carter replied, straightening the gloves and laying them flat on the table. "The why is straightforward as well: to tell you that you're being a bloody fool."

"I'm no--"

"Oh, you _are_ ," Carter cut him off sharply, but there was a knowing smile on her face instead of anger and it made him dislike her more. "Attempting to sell cutting-edge nuclear bomb technology to the Communists just so you can get Howard's attention? You're your father's son, all right, but your ambition's ahead of your capacity still and I've had forty-five years of watching a Stark do outrageous things. This is maybe top ten, but I don't think it would crack the top five. Not when your father built a working prototype of the Red Skull's plane and flew it over Nellis Air Force Base. That's a few spots all to itself."

Tony sat back, stunned and hurt and he knew he was sulking, but he didn't care. He didn't like being compared to his father, especially by someone who might know what they were talking about. His dad still talked about the flight of the 'Valkyrie' in '51, a joyride with Howard Hughes that had nearly gotten the both of them killed and then, when the Air Force failed to shoot them down, very definitely gotten them arrested. It was part of the Saga of the Search for Captain America and anything to do with Steve Rogers was second on the list of things he didn't want to listen to, right after comparisons to his father.

"I'm assuming there's a fault in the bomb's design; you're not quite enough of an idiot to give the Poles the blueprints of a working suitcase bomb," she continued when he didn't move or speak. "I'm also assuming that it's a flaw that won't easily be spotted and just as easily corrected, but I could be wrong on both accounts because while you are Howard's son, you're still sixteen and there is a boy in the phrase 'boy genius.'"

"Are you finished?" he asked waspishly. A correction to the list of things that pissed him off, ahead of anything to do with Captain America or paternal comparisons: everyone treated him like a kid and he was sick of it. He'd be graduating _MIT_ next year -- provided he didn't have to spend time in prison first -- and he'd just produced a miniaturized fusion reactor and he was _still_ going to be a child in everyone's eyes. Including Peggy Carter's.

She smiled at him, unruffled. "Oh, not hardly finished," she assured, looking almost joyful. "I have yet to make a dent in that armor of self-righteousness and indignation you are cloaking yourself in. A pity you couldn't have weaponized _that_."

At that moment, he seriously considered calling the FBI agents back in so he could deal with them instead.

"Oh, you can call for them," she told him and tilted her head toward the one-way mirror. "You keep looking longingly at them and they'll come running, I promise. They'll find an appropriate adult soon enough. But all they'll tell you is that they believe that your Polish 'Solidarity member' is really a Polish-speaking KGB agent and he had plans to use your bomb to blow up Fenway Park during the World Series. Which, frankly, is hard to take seriously; if the Soviets had that technology, they'd hardly waste it in such a fashion. This is the Eighties; terrorism is for non-state actors and Middle East dictators."

She waved the idea away with a graceful gesture that managed to convey a level of disdain Tony admired despite himself.

"I'm sure they'll also threaten you with jail time and stains upon your family name," she went on in the same dismissive tone. "As if the latter weren't your exact intent, although we both know this won't do it. But, as I mentioned, I've known your father for a very long time and so, unlike the fellows in the next room, I came here prepared to actually solve the problem at hand."

"Me?" Tony asked with as much sarcasm as he could muster. Which was a lot, he was proud to say.

"Selling weapons technology to foreign governments is a highly regulated business," Carter began, sitting back in her seat, looking all proper and ladylike. "I'm sure you've heard your father and Mister Stane complain about it at great length. Selling information and technology not already on the open market to an enemy of your own country is, in the hands of a clever government lawyer, a treason charge. Now, in this case, it's a treason charge that probably will not stick, especially considering your attorney's presumptive defense that it was just a cry for attention by a neglected child. But there will be consequences nonetheless."

Tony smiled darkly, glad to have something to come back with. "I'm Howard Stark's son, there won't be many."

Because Dad might only want to see him at birthdays and Christmas, but he wasn't going to visit a jail to do it.

"Oh, darling boy," Carter laughed. "Whatever made you think I was talking about you?"

"The business?" Tony asked, smiling back. "You think I give a crap about the business?"

Carter sobered. "No, I don't think you give any kind of scatalogical substance about the business that carries your name. But you do care about James Rhodes and he's going to be the one to pay for your sins."

Tony stopped smiling and leaned forward. "Are you threatening Rhodey to get to me?"

Rhodey wasn't his only friend, but he was one of a very small group of friends and was pretty much the only one Tony would do anything for, absolutely anything. Because he was the only one of Tony's friends who would never _ask_ him to do anything, absolutely anything.

" _You_ are threatening 'Rhodey' all by yourself," Carter told him and there was no more humor in her voice, just ice. And for the first time, it dawned on Tony that she'd walked into the FBI's Boston office and if there'd been any protest on their part, she'd won the argument. He knew enough about how real power worked to appreciate that she must have a lot of it.

"Young Master Rhodes is an ROTC cadet aspiring to fly fighter jets for the Air Force," Carter went on in a businesslike tone. "He has a bright future -- good grades, excellent training reports, and so forth and so on. Everything he needs to get a jump start on his career in military service. But that career will not be nearly what it could be if he winds up the unindicted accomplice of a would-be traitor."

Rhodey had no idea where he was right now or what he had been doing, at least beyond 'not good, probably to do with your Daddy issues,' but that covered so many of his actions that Rhodey hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. Which was why he'd reluctantly agreed to drive him to Magoun Square tonight (last night?) in his shitty-ass Datsun.

"The Pentagon has many things, Anthony Stark, and a lot of them have your family name on them," Carter warned. "But a sense of humor isn't one of them. They won't find your prank funny and, since they can't take it out on you or your father, they'll do the next best thing. Which is destroy the career of James Rhodes. Not outright, of course, because there'll be nothing criminal on his record, nothing to deny him his commission or dishonorably discharge him. But there will be rumor and that will be worse. For him, because it will destroy the career he'd set his heart upon, and for you because he'll know why and who is to blame."

Carter let him stew on that for a few moments and he did. Rhodey had one dream and that was to fly and, despite Tony promising to build him the jet fighter of his dreams that would make the Fighting Falcon look like Tweetybird, Rhodey wanted to do it for the Air Force.

Tony, under the right circumstances, could admit that he was selfish and spoiled and too smart for everyone's good, especially his own. He took getting thrown out of boarding schools as a kind of challenge, he took the MIT-Harvard prank wars too seriously for BPD's tastes, and he'd never minded collateral damage much because hey, if you're gonna run with the big dogs, you're gonna get bit.

But he couldn't let them take down Rhodey for this. Because Rhodey never asked for anything, wouldn't even let Tony buy the parts for a new engine to soup up that shitty-ass Datsun, and he was Tony's _friend._

"Now, we can let that macerate a bit more off to the side," Carter went on in a gentler tone. Not pitying, which Tony wouldn't have been able to take any more than smugness, but still kinder. "But where I think we can make a nice, neat package of all of this is for you to tell the fellows in the next room that you weren't attempting treason, but instead that you were attempting to help your father by finding out who was stealing secrets from Stark Industries."

Tony tilted his head. "Doesn't that require Dad playing along?"

"Not if you play it right," Carter assured. "Corporate espionage is a universal constant, especially in the arms industry. Stark Industries, like Grumman and every other defense sector business, is always looking for spies because there always _are_ spies. Tell them you were taking initiative, tell them it was something you noticed over the summer when you were working for your father, make it specific enough to be plausible but vague enough that nobody will want to follow up too closely because the work will seem too much."

He sat back. "Doesn't telling me what to tell them defeat the purpose if they're listening?"

Carter gave him a smile then and looked down at her purse in her lap. "They can't hear a thing. They're trying to read your lips, but you haven't said anything interesting even if they could. And they won't call you on it because I asked them not to observe and to intimate that they had not followed through on our agreement would be... undiplomatic. Among other things."

Stark Industries wasn't the only company that produced sonic scramblers, but theirs were the easiest to use and the lightest and he'd bet his monthly allowance on a J24-P being in her purse. Which made him wonder more who the hell she really was because those weren't cheap and they weren't standard issue for any government agency. And nobody, as far as he knew, got to tell the FBI to sit down and shut up in their own house. 

"Don't give them anything right away," Carter went on as she picked up her gloves and made to stand. "Let them stew until they get you your appropriate adult and your attorney. But then give them what they want, which is not to have to do all of the paperwork involved in ringing up a minor to be tried as an adult for whatever they're going to try to pin on you."

She did stand then and Tony figured he probably owed her the respect of standing as well, if only for Rhodey. She smiled when he did.

"Why are you helping me?" he asked. "You may know my dad, but you're not close with him. I've never heard of you."

Carter smiled, tiny and sad, and then it disappeared as if had never been. "You have, actually, I'm quite sure of it. But as part of a subject matter you never cared about. As for why, well, I have a long history of bailing Stark men out of trouble and it's practically a habit by now. Also, I was in town and there's precious little else to do in Boston after ten in the evening."

She left him with a nod and he sat back down to think about what had just happened and what he was going to do about it. The FBI agents came back in, pressing for details but hesitantly, like they were maybe more afraid of pissing off Peggy Carter than in him telling his lawyer -- who would not be appearing until mid-morning, so he could go sleep in a cell -- and he took that into consideration as well.

It wasn't until he'd already been freed on bond and back on campus and avoiding Rhodey, who'd found out about his arrest along with everyone else when the FBI had raided his workspace at the lab, that he realized that Peggy Carter probably had something to do with Captain America. She'd known Dad for forty-five years, she'd said, which made him a wartime connection and everything to do with Dad's war connections went back to Cap somehow. It dimmed his interest in her, grateful though he might be for her intervention, and what he wasn't interested in, he tended to forget.

It wasn't until 2011 that he was given cause to remember.

**Author's Note:**

> [A notice for this story was also posted to Tumblr, if you're into the reblogging sort of thing.](http://laporcupina.tumblr.com/post/108675177484/iron-man-cap-agent-carter-ficlet-inherited)


End file.
